It’s a long long time I’m looking for an inexpensive small laptop with long battery life and keyboard. So I can carry it everywhere to write notes, do ssh, or fix small bugs.
The experience I have with me 7" ebook reader says that under 10" is too small to work comfortably with text. Above 12" will be too big to carry. I think even 12" is too big.
I want it to run an open source OS like BSD or Linux. Unfortunately, age of netbooks are over. So I wonder what options I’ve got. As far as I have researched:
- Pinebook. The advantage is that it is open source and I can repair it easily meself. The disadvantage is that I think 11.6" is a lil big. Not sure as I never had a laptop at this size to tell for sure. But it seems these devices are not available in Pine64 store anymore. Only Pinebook pro which is 14".
- A chromebook. I am not very much sure about these. It seems I can install Linux at least on some of them. The advantages are that I can easily find one for cheap. The disadvantage seems to be that I won’t be able to repair them easily. I guess the important part is the eMMC and its failure means bye bye? If I could put them from uSD, this shouldn’t be a problem. The chromebooks with SSD seem too expensive.
- Reboot an old netbook. Advantage is that I can easily find one. Probably I could make changes to the laptop to make it more modern and usable. Mainly, replace the original lithium battery with a new custom one, possibly lighter and longer lasting. I could also replace the charging circuit and port with a modern type C. However, I’m not sure if one of these will last long enough given that they are second hand.
- A Windows tablet. I could get one of these with keyboard and install Linux on them. Haven’t researched much about them.
I also have found Chuwi minibooks. But their support said they are discontinued.
Thoughts? Suggestions?
macbook air 11 2015 8gb version. just this one and no other, no 13, no 2013, no 4 gb versions, etc.
very linux friendly (once you sort out broadcom wifi drivers), sips power, tolerates undervolt. it’s useless to the apple crowd as it don’t got support for latest OS so it can be had for cheap, even more so if you wanna buy busted units and frankenstein together a new one. also, wide cross-gen parts compatibility. aliexpress got $5 USB-C to Magsafe2 adapter so you don’t gotta haul the charger around.
don’t get the 12" ones, unless they’re close to free. spectacular screen, but the keyboard is atrocious and prone to die, with no option of replacing it, SSD is integrated so can’t get the data off it if something dies, fragile display connection, it’s a shit-show.
Thank you so much for this! Why 2015? Why not 2013? Also, isn’t it possible to boot them from microSD? I’m looking for a sub 12" device.
way more modern CPU and chipset resulting in better power management; also faster and better graphics, but that’s not important for the use case. an undervolted i5 5250u can run with wifi and lit screen in the sub-5W range, netting you 10ish hours of continuous light use out of a decent battery and days of standby (that you can turn into weeks if you implement suspend-then-hibernate). you could make an earilier model work but the price difference should be in the $20 range, so why bother?
edit: microSD, yeah, I guess you can boot off them but why would you want the flaky and slow mess when you got a perfectly fine PCI-E SSD?
As I researched online, I’m not sure if I can boot from microSD. But most likely I will be able to put from USB. It could be
/booton USB and the rest on uSD. But I will have to buy an expensive uSD to get at least like 150MB/sIf I go this way, the advantage is that I can get an old macbook air with broken SSD working. And since the SSD is not normally replaceable, this means excellent bargaining chance for me :)))
2017 and previous airs and 2016 and previous pros have replaceable storage.
Thanks! I will keep this in mind.